[ExI] sound archive

spike spike66 at att.net
Sat Jan 1 17:54:54 UTC 2011


Today while leaving the restaurant I heard an instantly recognizable sound
that I hadn't heard in thirty years or more.  It was a very distinctive
sound that anyone over about fifty would know:  cleenk...
flish...flish...flish...... clack.  It was the sound of one of those old
time metal cigarette lighters, the kind that were swept away by the
disposable plastic Bic lighters in the 1970s.  Now of course it is rare to
even see anyone smoking.  Tobacco anyway.  But anyone who was around in the
1960s saw plenty of smokers and heard that sound often.  The lighters
outlived the lungs of the users.  

This one is a knockoff of the old Rossingnols, but it looks exactly like the
original:

http://www.dinodirect.com/Deluxe-Metal-Oil-Cigarette-Lighter-Gold/AFFID-11.h
tml?DinoDirect

OK so I can buy something like this now, and even the fluid for it, thanks
to the internet.  For perhaps 10 years from about 1990 to 2000 that product
would have been extinct, because they weren't available as far as I know,
from mainstream stores.  So plenty of younger people wouldn't know what that
flish flish sound is.

I recall in my own misspent youth, there was a local rock station which used
to play a game where they would give concert tickets to the first person who
could identify a sound, usually something that *anyone* over 60 at the time
would get instantly, such as the sound of a model A starting, or the
whirring sound an old time refrigerator makes when an icicle from the cold
coil grew long enough to touch the circulation fan.  Modern refrigerators
don't do that, but the old ones did, pre-1940 perhaps.  The station had a
target audience of 10 to 20 years, and of course we didn't know those
sounds, but our grandparents did. They had one of those refrigerators, which
one fixed by unplugging for about half an hour, icicle melted, no more whirr
for a couple weeks or more.

We need to create a sound archive of stuff that we would all know, but the
current younger ones wouldn't.  A good example is that sound of a dialup
modem from about 1994: wheeeee...deeeeblbbkblblblblbllbllblblllbpp...
Remember that?  How long has it been since you heard it?  

Is there already a sound archive somewhere?  

We can google on "Rossignol lighter" but there is no way to google on an
unknown sound and have it give back "Rossignol lighter" or dialup modem. 

spike


   





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